Appeal for restaurants to join One Million Meals initiative

The One Million Meals campaign that recently won support from footballing legend David Beckham is urgently appealing for more Halal restaurants to join in the good cause.

“One Million Meals is doing great work on getting nutritious and healthy meals to key workers and healthcare staff. Your support can make a difference,” Beckham was quoted yesterday by ITV News.

While thousands of free nutritious meals have already been delivered, one of the founders of the initiative said that more help is now needed to reach key workers at the forefront of the fight against Covid-19.

With the project currently funding a £5 limit on meals, the aim is to “deliver 50 to 100 meals a day and collectively upto 10,000 meals” to the more vulnerable across the country.

One Million Meals was kickstarted by three British Pakistanis including Spice Village restaurant founder Suleman Raza who told FtLion that it was necessary for “restaurants from all over UK to join the campaign”.

One Million Meals is doing great work on getting nutritious and healthy meals to key workers and healthcare staff. – David Beckham

The campaign’s all-volunteer team says it “identifies demand from essential workplaces, and then arranges deliveries from participating restaurants to these workplaces”.

One Million Meals also wants to support struggling restaurants, takeaways and caterers by “building partnerships with local restaurants all over the UK to deliver meals to hospitals in their immediate vicinity and in their local areas”.

Mr Raza said: “We decided to call our initiative One Million Meals to set ourselves, and the public, an ambitious but necessary goal. Our heroes in the NHS and on the front lines deserve a good, hot meal after a day of exhausting and dangerous work fighting the pandemic. Everyone has their part to play in this crisis; we might not be able to save lives ourselves, but we can provide our life-savers with the fuel they need to beat this.

“So far, One Million Meals has been relying on our team’s resources and the amazing generosity of our sponsors to provide meals to key workers and frontline staff. We have now had over 15 hospitals express interest in our services. However, to meet our increasing demand, we are reaching out to the public to help us bring food to the people keeping them safe and healthy.”

Over 4000 meals have already been provided by One Million Meals which is being supported by various doctors’ organisations including the Association of Pakistani Physicians and Surgeons of the United Kingdom Foundation.

With a 100% donation policy, the campaign has already raised over £12k of its initial £50k target via a GoFundMe fundraiser: https://www.gofundme.com/f/s8egdn-one-million-meals.